


catch me (i'm falling)

by spookyfoot



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, victor skates the saltiest eros program of all time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-21 00:03:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16565690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyfoot/pseuds/spookyfoot
Summary: The last thing Yuuri expects to hear during Victor’s short program press conference at Skate America is his own name.“Victor, can you tell us what inspired your program?”Victor grins, Cheshire cat feasting on the coal mine canary before it ever had a chance to sing. “Not a what. A who.” Victor turns away from the reporter to stare directly into the camera. “I haven’t forgotten our dance, Yuuri Katsuki." And then he winks, “I’ll see you soon.”What?Phichit turns to him and says, “I think this might be Victor Nikiforov’s version of asking you out on a date.”Victor skates the saltiest Eros routine of all time and issues a call out on international television.





	catch me (i'm falling)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seventhstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/gifts).



> written for shall we read's second issue. thanks for having me!
> 
> gifted to the one true love of my life, a blessing to us all <3

The last thing Yuuri expects to hear during Victor’s short program press conference at Skate America is his own name. He’s still trying to smother his nosebleed and the dumpster fire remnants of his dignity—who _allowed_ Victor to skate a program that sexy?—when it happens.

“Victor, can you tell us what inspired your program?”

Victor grins, Cheshire cat feasting on the coal mine canary before it ever had a chance to sing. “Not a what. A who.” Victor turns away from the reporter to stare directly into the camera. “I haven’t forgotten our dance, Yuuri Katsuki.”

Yuuri’s fantasized about Victor saying his name so many times he thinks it’s an auditory hallucination. Until Phichit spits out his drink, and turns to Yuuri, eyes wide and glittering.

“Yuuri. Please, tell me something. Did _Victor Nikiforov_ just call you out during an international press conference. Because I think that just happened.”

Well. Shit. Yuuri would have preferred the hallucination option. Beside him, Yuuri’s phone emits an unrelenting stream of vibrations. Yuuri’s ears start ringing—Phichit’s right next to him and he’s convinced his parents to email most of the time. He’s not sure who else would even use that number.

On screen Victor continues, “I’ll see you soon, Yuuri.”

What. The Fuck.

“I think this might be Victor Nikiforov’s version of asking you out on a date.”

//

Yuuri’s spent all of his free time in Detroit doing two things:  studiously avoiding pity invites and bruising his ass (“tailbone!”) falling out of the quad flip he’s definitely not practicing in the rink after hours. In any case, he’s not prepared to host a guest, let alone a guest that also happens to be Victor Nikiforov. Yuuri’s imagined what it might be like to have Victor here, in Detroit, looking at him like he's happy to see him, like he knows exactly who Yuuri is and that there’s no one he’d rather be looking at.

But.

But now that Victor’s here—that fall of silver hair, those gleaming teeth, that heart-shaped smile—it’s more nightmare than daydream.

So Yuuri does the only thing he can think of. He panics, slams the door in Victor Nikiforov’s face, panics some more, and runs to his room, where his seventeen posters of Victor Nikiforov stare down at him in judgement.

“Not you, too,” Yuuri groans, burying his face in his pillow. He doesn’t notice his door squeaking open.

“Yuuri,” Phichit says, standing in the now open doorway, “why is Victor Nikiforov in our apartment? Does this have something to do with his internationally televised booty call invitation?”

Yuuri makes another incoherent noise. He’s bonding with his pillow and Phichit’s interrupting. He turns, one eye trained on the door where Phichit stands, arms crossed, hip cocked.

“Ah. I see. We’ve hit Defcon 5. A new record, impressive. But it’s still got competition from the watermelon vodka shot incident incident from last semester.”  

“That never happened. It was a collective dream.”

“Okay, so this is worse, got it. Is it worse than the time Mari found those unlicensed Victor Nikiforov posters under your mattress at home and then told us about it over skype with your entire family there?”

“No, they’ve all been dethroned by this exact moment where you’re making me relive _all of them_. “

It’s not even a competition. This is worse than all of them combined. Yuuri’s daydreams of standing on the podium next to Victor now includes a conversation full of stuttered excuses about why Yuuri slammed a door in his face that one time. A true tragedy.

Phichit carries on, unconcerned. “Honestly, you should be proud. How many people can say they wandered around a desert and made a water source spring up out of sheer thirst.” Phichit pauses, tilts his head to the side, continues, “though I guess in your case it’s more like a garden where you’re incredibly picky and don’t see any of the fruit as edible.”

“You’re taking this metaphor too far. This friendship is officially cancelled.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Phichit lies. “If that that’s the case, I’ll just let Victor in without giving you time to take down your posters,” he says, flashing Yuuri his sunniest and most terrifying smile. The sort that’s made people cutting in front of him at Starbucks head straight to the back of the line.

“You wouldn—” Yuuri starts. He cuts himself off. He’s roomed with Phichit for three years. Phichit absolutely would.

Yuuri sighs and closes his eyes. Maybe, if he goes to sleep he’ll wake up in the dream he’s clearly having. “Why is he even here?” Yuuri asks, squeezing his eyes tighter. It’s not working.

“Maybe you could, oh, I don’t know, ask him yourself? I know, it’s a crazy idea, but I’ve had worse. Probably.”

“Definitely. You’ve definitely had worse—”

“Great! I’m glad we agree. Because he’s currently sitting in our living room.”

“ _Phichit_!”

“What? We have coasters. We’re not animals,” Phichit says, flouncing out of the room before Yuuri can get another word in.

Yuuri sighs, looks down at his clothes, and immediately regrets it. Well. The sooner he gets this over with the sooner he can get started repressing it.

(He glances over at his window longingly. Why did they have to live on the eighth floor?)

On the other side of the wall he can hear the murmur of voices. He looks at the window again. Well, there’s a first time for everything.

Except he can see his mother’s disappointed face, hearing that he treated a guest like this. And that’s enough to make him push past the fear, the embarrassment, and the what-the-actual-fuck-is-going-on-here long enough to make his way into the living room.

//

As it turns out, a decade plus of living with posters of someone doesn’t do much to prepare you for the real thing. Surprisingly.

Victor Nikiforov is bright and brash and blunt with a million different quicksilver smiles that Yuuri’s desperately scrambling to catalogue like they’re some sort of limited edition poster.

“So,” Victor purrs, leaning in close enough Yuuri can see the constellation of freckles dusting the bridge of his nose, “what have you been working on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you haven’t had your first competition in the Grand Prix series yet—I thought you might have some surprises up your sleeve.”

(Frankly, after last year’s disaster of a season, salvaged only by a skin-of-his-teeth third place finish as Japanese Nationals—which was still a disappointment—Yuuri was surprised the he’d managed to qualify for the Grand Prix series again this year.)

“I—have you been watching my programs?”

“Of course! And all the videos Phichit’s posted on Instagram!”

“The videos he _what_?” Yuuri says, turning to look at Phichit, who’s far devoting far more attention than necessary to making his lunch. No sandwich requires that amount of concentrated focus. Yuuri frowns and makes a mental note to blackmail Phichit about deviating from their pre-competition meal plan. It’s what he deserves.

Victor continues like Yuuri’s carefully constructed boundaries aren’t crumbling right in front of him. “I love what you’re doing with your jump entries this season—though the jumps themselves are still just as sloppy.”

And, well. That’s nothing Yuuri didn’t know himself. It would make the compliment part of the equation seem a bit less far fetched—if it didn’t imply that Victor had watched multiple seasons of his routines. “ _What?_ ”

“I especially loved your program from two years ago, that Ina Bauer…” Victor says, trailing off and staring into the middle distance.

“Umm…”

Victor snaps himself back to the present with a smile that looks like it’s going to snap itself. “Are you training today? I’d love to see you skate in person,” he says.

 _You really don’t_ , Yuuri thinks.

“Well—”

“We’re heading to the rink in about an hour,” Phichit says, “You’re welcome to join us!”

Yuuri’s heart stops, and he turns to Phichit, sending him a look he hope says _any and all future care packages you receive from home are now forfeit._ Phichit blanches, so Yuuri’s pretty sure he got the message. Still he shrugs and mouths _you’ll thank me._

 _I doubt it_ , Yuuri mouths back.

“What was that?”

Yuuri flails. Right. Victor. “Oh, just, there’ll be a bunch of people there. And it’ll be boring, just a lot of figures. So many figures. Basically only figures.”

Victor lifts a finger to his lips and taps them thoughtfully . “You know, I really don’t do figures enough. It’s probably why your step sequences are so much better than mine! So, I’d love to come.”

“Great!” Phichit says, pointedly stepping in before Yuuri can voice his objections.

Victor holds his hand out to Yuuri. “Give me your phone so I can put my number in your contacts. Then you can send me the address and I’ll meet you at the rink after I get my bag from the hotel,” Victor pauses and looks at Yuuri from under his eyelashes, “unless you want to come with me?”

“I—no, let’s meet at the rink. I’ll see you there. Bye,” Yuuri says fleeing back into his room out of self preservation. There’s only so much he can handle at once and he’s too embarrassed and aroused and humilated at the combination of the two to spend any more time in Victor’s presence. (Un)fortunately for him, Phichit’s already made that inescapable. Yuuri has the worst friends.

//

Yuuri finds a comfortable home in denial and puts down a down payment in repression. He’s not going to think about Sochi or what it means that Victor Nikiforov says his name on T.V. or that he’s here in Detroit and that he was in Yuuri’s apartment using one of Yuuri’s coasters with Makkachin’s face on it.

Yuuri is determinedly _not_ thinking about none of those things as he falls out of his quad Salchow and smacks against the ice for the umpteenth time that day. Yuuri is good at denying the things that are happening to him, which is why he’s excellent at pretending that Victor Nikiforov isn’t standing at the rink boards of Detroit Skating Club, a single finger pressed against his lips, eyes discerning—calculating.

Yuuri can handle this. Maybe. After all, against his own will and ninety nine percent of his better judgement, Yuuri had decided to continue training in Detroit, with Celestino, facing the scene, the cause, of his humiliation day in and day out. Maybe there was something to be said for exposure therapy.

Except.

Except when Yuuri makes eye contact with Victor across the ice, he’s convinced that there’s not amount of exposure therapy in the world that would have kept him from tripping over his own feet under the press of Victor’s gaze.

“Yuuri!” Victor says, moments after Yuuri regains his balance.

(He’s technically steady, holding himself up on two feet, but he swears it doesn’t feel like it.)

(He also doesn’t scream, but it’s a close thing.)

He catches a single glimpse of Victor before he’s swarmed by a crowd of Yuuri’s rinkmates. Though when Yuuri skates another loop around the ice, he realizes there are people around Victor that he’s never seen at the rink before. Ever.

 _This is good_ , Yuuri tells himself, _maybe he’ll be so distracted by everyone else he’ll forget why he came here._  But even as he thinks it, he feels something twist in his gut.

He keeps skating. And crashes into something warm and solid.

“If you wanted to touch me, all you had to do was say so,” Victor says. Because of course it’s him, it wouldn't be Yuuri’s life if it weren’t solely defined by improbability and suffering. Still, there’s part of him that preens at the fact that Victor’s apparently ditched all of his admirers to come talk to him.

Yuuri’s face burns. He’s surprised it doesn’t melt the ice.

“I didn’t realize you were here,” Yuuri lies. “Sorry.”

Victor’s face falls, but he recovers so quickly that Yuuri questions whether he saw it at all. He turns away from Yuuri to scan the ice and lets out a low whistle. “You really do practice figures a lot, don’t you?”

“It’s not like I’m good at anything else,” Yuuri says. Like a disaster. He suddenly wishes that the heat from his face _would_ melt the ice so that he’d at least have a quick and convenient escape route.

It only gets worse when Victor taps his index finger against his lips and scans his eyes over Yuuri’s body; Yuuri’s felt less exposed at pole dancing classes—and he’s worn booty shorts with peach emoji’s on either cheek to those.

(In his darkest moment, Yuuri despairs of getting a gold medal in anything that isn’t plumbing new depths of shame. It’s like embarrassment is the Marianas Trench—Yuuri, somehow, still hasn’t managed to reach the bottom.)

(It proves prophetic, he manages a few nonsense syllables before skating over to the boards for water. If his mouth is full then he can’t actually _talk._ )

“Thirsty?” Phichit calls to him from a few meters away. It’s loud enough for half the rink to hear, naturally. Half the rink includes Victor, naturally because Phichit is the worst and Yuuri’s eating all of his Hello Panda snacks when they get back to the apartment. If Yuuri manages to avoid dying of embarrassment for that long. The odds on that are not in his favor—if Yuuri were betting on himself he wouldn’t have money in his bank account to cover that loss. Especially after last season. Yuuri’s lucky that Phichit was willing to keep training in Detroit this season; Yuuri knows that Phichit had already had a new home rink all picked out, that he’d been excited to be closer to his family.

(“Celestino’s hair care maintenance budget is thanking you, trust me,” Phichit had said the last time Yuuri’d apologized. Now Phichit glares at him every time he tries to bring it up, and Yuuri’s seen Phichit’s glare the slackers on a group project into action with looks that were far more mild. Anyone who underestimates Phichit’s ambition or crafty mind because of his sunny smiles is getting what’s coming to them.)

Yuuri ignores him, grasps his water bottle and drains it, grateful for the distraction. Victor’s begun skating graceful loops over the ice and Yuuri’s not sure his heart can take it. All he wants it to watch Victor but with the incredibly high probability that that option ends in regret, he’s better off focusing on his water bottle. Water can’t hurt him.

Wrong. He should have known better than to issue the universe a challenge because less than three seconds later there’s a torrent of water streaming over his head, soaking him to the bone.

“What the fuck,”  Yuuri sputters. He can feel the chill of the rink through his damp shirt—his mostly transparent shirt. He regrets so many things, there’s not enough time to name them all; Victor’s skating towards him too fast and Yuuri’s doing his best to maintain a polite facade even as panic mounts in his chest.

Phichit is unapologetic, “I’m just speeding this nonsense up. You’re not the only one who looks thirsty,” he says, nodding towards Victor; Victor’s who’s frozen in the center of the rink, ass to ice, somehow making even that look elegant.

“Hey, Victor, you should come get some water. I’ve heard that dehydration can make it difficult to keep your balance,” Phichit says.

“Why are you like this,” Yuuri hisses. Victor’s already gotten to his feet and started skating over. Yuuri’s trapped.

“Because the sooner you figure out whatever this is,” Phichit says, with a vague wave of his hand, “the sooner I can get back to focusing on more important things. Like training for my upcoming competitions and whether or not I can convince the cashier at the frozen yogurt place to put extra stamps on my card. I want that free 4oz of frozen yogurt, Yuuri. And I’m going to get it. And, maybe we can get tips from Victor while he’s here—even though he’s probably the kind of person to tell you your jumps need more _whoosh_ than anything particularly useful.”

“I’m sure Victor’s a great coach!” Yuuri protests.

“Why am I not surprised? But seriously I’m pretty sure he’d tell you his ATM pin code if you asked—even though you have glasses, you’re still blind to someone being interested in you.”

“I hate you so much.”

“No, you don’t—but we both know that you’ve got the gold medal in denial, so don’t worry. I won’t take it too personally.”

Yuuri’s never felt so called out in his life—aside from a few days ago when _Victor Nikiforov_  decided to issue a challenge on international tv. But since that was obviously a collective delusion, it doesn’t count. Mostly.

Victor’s been watching them from a distance, head tilted to the side, amusement clear on his face. “I’m fine. I was actually thinking of running through my short program.” He makes eye contact with Yuuri, a smirk curling at the corner of his mouth. “My phone’s on the boards over there, would you mind grabbing it for me?”

And Yuuri’s helpless to do anything other than squeak out a _yes_. When he looks around, he sees that all of his rink mates have decided now is the perfect time to take a water break, leaving Victor in sole possession of the ice.

(And if that isn’t a metaphor for the last five years in men’s competitive figure skating, Yuuri’s not sure what is.)

When Yuuri hands Victor his phone, Victor unlocks it, punching in his passcode in full view and sliding Yuuri a glance out of the corner of his eye before his face lights up with a smile that Yuuri’s never seen on any of his posters. Yuuri tucks it away, keeps it close to his heart, a souvenir for when Victor inevitably decides that Detroi—and by extension Yuuri—are no longer worth his time. Victor manages to make an auxiliary cord appear with a wave of his hand, tells Yuuri to press play, and skates back towards the center of the ice. The first strum of the guitar sounds through the rink and Yuuri’s breath catches in his throat. Victor cocks his hip, tosses Yuuri a wink, and starts into the program’s first complex step sequence. When Victor runs his hands down his chest, Yuuri’s soul leaves his body. The entire rink has gone silent, caught in the current of anticipation and wonder.

He spends the rest of the routine spellbound. Victor’s always been incredible at engaging his audience. Somehow, he keeps managing to meet Yuuri’s gaze even through the program’s twists and turns. This is too erotic to watch in front of other people; if he’s honest Yuuri’s not sure if he’s ascended to some higher plane or gone straight to hell.  
“There’s absolutely nothing straight about what’s happening here,” Phichit says. Either Yuuri’s spoken out loud or Phichit’s read his mind. At this point neither would surprise him. He’s never been known for his impulse control and Victor’s presence has only made it worse.

Yuuri ignores Phichit—like he deserves—and Victor heads into his final spin. The rink is silent as he hits the final pose before a smattering of hesitant applause begins and swells into a full fledged thunder. Even the hockey players standing by the far boards are clapping, spellbound.

Yuuri squints. One of them actually has a nosebleed.

 _That’s fair_ , Yuuri thinks. It’s an appropriate reaction, considering. He’s more surprised that he doesn’t have one too. Victor unfolds from from his pose, panting. He flashes a broad, familiar smile around the rink, before it shifts into something smaller and more intimate once he turns towards Yuuri.

“So?” Victor asks as he glides over. For some reason, it feels like Yuuri’s opinion’s the only one he’s waiting for.

“It was very...eros,” Yuuri says.

Victor looks disappointed, “that’s all you have to say?”

“Your edges were sloppy coming out of your turns,” Yuuri adds, because he’s an idiot who lost control over his mouth hours ago. He regrets everything.

But if anything, Victor’s smile only grows brighter. “Why don’t you show me then?” he asks with a wink before leading Yuuri out onto the ice.

//

Victor asks Yuuri to show him the best of Detroit; Yuuri panics and takes him to his favorite dog park. The dog park where he stress eats terrible but delicious street vendor hot dogs. There’s something tragic about eating hot dogs while watching dog after dog pass by. But, like most things in his life, Yuuri chooses not to look at it too deeply.

It takes them a while to get to Yuuri’s usual spot because they have to stop and ask each dog’s owner their names and if they can pet them before moving on. It’s a dog park and it’s early evening just after people have gotten off of work; there are a lot of dogs to pet. But someone has to. At least, that’s what Victor says as they approach Yuuri’s usual bench. By the time they arrive, Yuuri feels intimately familiar with the tone of voice Victor uses to talk to dogs large and small.

“I can see why you like it here,’ Victor says. Stretched out on the bench next to him, Yuuri’s hands twitch, feeling empty without a hotdog in them just by force of habit. But there’s a difference between bringing Victor Nikiforov to his sadness dog park and giving him a front row seat to his shame. If dignity were a bank account, Yuuri’d be far beyond overdrawn—and accumulating a horrifying amount of overdraft feed. In his palm, Victor’s phone lets of a series of frantic chimes, a flood of notifications lighting up the screen. Victor glances down, pressed his lips together, and smashes the button on the side of his phone so that the screen goes dark. Almost immediately it starts buzzing and lights up once more.

“If you need to get tha--”

“No,” Victor says before pointing out an adorable pomeranian a few meters away. His phone keeps ringing. And ringing. And ringing.

“Victor—”

“Fine,” Victor says, picking up his phone with more force than it warrants. A quick torrent of Russian follows. Yuuri’s able to pick out a few words and phrases—the product of hours spent on sketchy message boards that signed him up for emails from exiled Nigerian princes and gave his laptop a petri dish’s worth viruses. Over the course of the phone call, Victor’s spine goes rigid, his constants clipped and terse. He hangs up with a motion so forceful that Yuuri wonders for a moment if Victor will crack his phone screen; he doesn’t, but he hides his phone in the pocket of his coat before turning to Yuuri with a brittle smile.

“Where were we?”

Yuuri frowns. “Are—is everything okay?”

“Never better!”

“Victor—”

“You know, your footwork is much better than mine—”

Yuuri wishes Victor would stop _lying—_

“—so why aren’t your competition scores better?”

“I—”

“You didn’t have trouble with your jumps in Juniors, so why now?”

Victor’s phone starts buzz again, only partially muffled by the fabric of his coat. “Victor, I think—”

“Why aren’t you giving me a real challenge?”

“Why aren’t you answering your phone?” Yuuri snaps.

“Where did this confidence go when you were on the ice earlier?”

Yuuri lets out an ugly laugh, “I think confident is the last word anyone would use to describe me.”

“I highly doubt that, especially not after Sochi.”

“ _Especially after Sochi_ ,” Yuuri says.

“I don’t know why you’re embarrassed—”

“No. Of course not. _You_ wouldn’t know. “ Yuuri jumps to his feet, voice thick with the emotion welling up in his throat,  “if you’re just here to make fun of me then maybe it’s better if you leave.” He’d suspected that Victor had come here on a whim, but he’d never thought he’d be outright _cruel._

Victor whips his head towards him, cold fury in his eyes, and just behind that something Yuuri can’t name—hurt? “Oh and is that all the banquet was to you, some sort of joke?”

Yuuri can’t remember anything of the banquet outside of the first five minutes. He may have made the mistake of underestimating Drunk Yuuri again, which, he really doesn’t want to go down that road, not right now and not with Victor Nikiforov of all people. If Victor has any kindness left in him he’ll let Yuuri live out the rest of his shame alone.

Victor’s phone starts ringing again, angry and insistent.

“You should get that,” Yuuri says, and then does what he does best. He runs.

//

Yuuri manages to ignore Phichit’s accusing stare and high tail it into his room. While Phichit may make Yuuri’s personal life his business a lot of the time, he’s also a good friend who knows when Yuuri needs to be alone.

Yuuri spends enough time in bed that he can track the passage of the afternoon by the way that the sun slants against his now conspicuously bare walls.  Even though they’re safely stowed i n a plastic folder underneath his mattress, Yuuri can feel all seventeen sets of Victor Nikiforov’s piercing blue eyes on him. Judging him.

The sun sets. His room goes dark but he doesn’t bother getting up from the bed to switch on the light. The darker it gets, the worse he feels, growing in his chest like a weed, pushing through the emotional concrete he’d pourded to plaster over the hurt. When he can’t stand it any longer, when it feels like a line of ants has crawled their way under his skin, insistent on itching their way to the surface, Yuuri bolts from his bed to snag his skatebag from where he’d dropped it by the door earlier.

There’s only one place he can go.

The rink is dim and dark, the emergency lights the only source of illumination, casting a ghostly sheen of light over the scraped smooth surface of the ice. Yuuri’s key, palm-warm and not strictly legal gets slipped back into into his bag as he tightens the laces on his boots and then takes to the ice.

It’s quiet. The only sound is the scratch and scrape of his blades. A single loop, a choctaw, double toe loop.

The shafts of moonlight breaking through the high rinkside windows form a grid across the ice, the shape and shift of them is the only reason he notices time passing. He keeps skating. He loses himself in the sounds of his blades, in the feel of the ice beneath him; he finds himself in the motions, in the crack of his skates hitting the ice, in the rhythm of his breath and his heartbeat.

He finds himself twisting into a familiar opening pose, one that he wouldn’t dare assume if there were anyone here to watch.  And even without the music, with the motion of his limbs he can hear a familiar song calling him, welling up out of the silence. He raises his arms above his head in a gentle sweeping motion and begins. His body makes the music for him, casting notes out into stillness of the rink. All the late night sessions, all the hours that he pushed himself, lost and found himself in these movements have burned the routine into his bones, shifted it into something deeper and more visceral; something woven into the tendons and tremors of his muscles themselves.

He throws himself into the first quad, stumbles, and keeps going, heart in his throat. He glides into the next step sequence, arms curling around himself, at first protective and then morphing into reaching, pleading. Like there’s someone in front of him who remains just out of reach. He heads into the final spin, breathing hard. The constant push and pull in his lungs guides him into the final poste of the routine and then it’s over. He lets his head fall, and then his body follows when the sound of applause rings out through the rink.

No one else is supposed to be here. _He’s_ not even supposed to be here. But he knows it’s not a dream from the way that the chill from the ice bleeds through the damp fabric of his shirt; he knows it’s not a dream because life is never that kind.

“That was beautiful,” the voice is at once familiar and terrifying.

Victor wasn’t meant to see this— _no one_ was meant to see this. This was a secret that was meant to die with the waning years of Yuuri’s career.

“Why are you here?”

“For a little after hours skating of course,” Victor says. And it has to be a lie, because Yuuri can hear his street shoes slapping against the ice.

But Yuuri’s had enough of whatever incomprehensible game Victor’s playing. He stays where he is, back pressed flat against the ice. At this point, he’s in the worst possible timeline, he’s not giving it any more to work with. “Right. Of course.”

He can see Victor’s soft leather loafers from the corner of his eye. “You’ve clearly been practicing that. For a while.”

Yuuri’s not going to dignify that with a response—it’s the only shot at dignity he has left.

Of course, Victor takes that as an invitation to lie down on the ice next to him. As one does.

“Yuuri. Why are you so unhappy that I’m here?” Victor asks.

“I—” All the possible answers crowd themselves onto Yuuri’s tongue jostling for space, “I’m sure it was embarrassing for you to have to watch that, especially after Sochi,” Yuuri says, because what is self preservation. Goodbye, dignity. Hello frustration and bitterness.

Victor huffs out a bitter laugh. “Okay, got it. You weren’t happy with Sochi. But you kept skating. You kept trying. You sent a message, to me, to everyone.”

And, well. Yuuri’s been sending Victor messages through his skating for years, hoping against himself, against everything that one of them would make it through; against all the odds and fuck ups it seems that one of them has.

It could be a dream if it weren’t for the chill of the ice, seeping through his sweat-drenched shirt, plastering it to his skin; it could be a nightmare if it weren’t for the heat of Victor’s body on the ice beside him, a beacon for Yuuri to home in on.

Victor keeps going. “You learned my routine. Why? What do you want? Who do you want me to be to you? A father figure? A brother? A lover? Your coach?” Victor asks, voice rough with something Yuuri’s too scared to name.

“No— _no._ I don’t want you to be—I just want you to be _Victor._ And I want to be your equal. To meet you where you are. That’s...that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

It’s easier to say it outloud, lying on the ice side by side, positioned so that he can’t see Victor’s face; so that Victor can’t see his.

A gentle brush of fingertips against his arm, so light he’s not sure it’s there at first. “After seeing you skate my routine, I can’t wait,” Victor says, soft and sure.

And Yuuri feels something like hope well up within him for the first time all season. He’ll make sure Victor can’t ever take his eyes off of him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
